It is often advantageous to allow a user of a communication system to access different communication devices. For example, a user associated with a desk phone in the user's office may wish to access a phone in a different room. As a further example, users may have need of different communication capabilities for different communications, and those capabilities may be best supported by different communication devices. In such situations, it is often desirable to present the device used to support the communication (i.e., the media stream) to other communication devices and/or the communication system as the user's personal device. Similar situations arise when advanced call control is desired from a softclient running on a computing device.
Systems have been developed that allow a user to forward calls from a communication device associated with a communication address, to an alternate communication device. However, communications placed from the alternate device are typically not presented to called parties as being associated with the communication address of the user's primary device. In addition, communications conducted in connection with an alternate device using call forwarding are generally made without the application of call features or restrictions associated with the primary device.
Still other systems have been developed that pair an alternate device to a user's primary device. For example, systems have been developed to support telecommuters, to enable users to present a consistent communication address to called and calling parties. However, such systems suffer from deficiencies with respect to the application of calling features and restrictions. For example, where pairing is accomplished by a mechanism outside of a server responsible for applying other features and restrictions, that other server may be unaware of a pairing that has been implemented. As a result, the features and restrictions applied to a call involving paired devices may be those associated with a paired device, rather than a pairing device or both the pairing and paired devices. This can in turn result in a failure to apply restrictions that should be enforced with respect to the call and/or in desired features being unavailable.